AbstractThispaper explains about the key Incident Response Plan which is developed for myCompany.
Mainly includes the key stakeholders who are part of this IncidentResponse Planning Committee. The roles and responsibilities of individualstakeholder, when is the exact time for each team to respond depending on theincident criticality. Also about various key business activities being impactedas part of any security incident in the company.
I also stated why these stakeholdersare considered as key role with respect to Incident Response. Also expressed myviews how do a company can overcome from security incidents.Keywords:Incident Response Planning (IRP), Protected Personal Information (PPI), HumanResources (HR), Public Relations (PR). IncidentResponse Planning is a combination of different steps which are designed inorder to recover a company’s business activities to normal state after unexpectedincident which halts the regular business processes. IRP is planned and designedby a team which is formed from different business areas in the company. IRP isavailable with almost every company in order to detect the future cyber-attacks,data breaches, internal data theft risks and other issues which will beanalyzed by IRP team upfront so they can come up with a strategy to handle allthis issues.
The IRP developed by me for my company will have a planning committeewith important stakeholders as below1. InformationTechnology Services2. SecurityManagement3. LegalTeam4. HumanResources5. PublicRelationsInformation Technology Services:This includes Database, Development, Testing and Networking teams which willhandle all the Business Applications in the company. Each team is importantsuch as database team is crucial in protecting our costumer’s data, developersare responsible to write code logic in order to protect from invalid data inputwhich we can expect from some cyber attackers and in parallel testers are needto test the business applications robustly.
Company websites also connects toexternal suppliers networks where our Network Admins play an important role inhosting all such external websites n a secured way. Security Management: Thisteam is part of IR planning committee as it will have an overall knowledgerelated to company’s security. With coordinating with security management team wecan secure our costumers data from any kind of data breaches. As part of IRplan they suggest us how to overcome data theft by providing validauthentication to all the business users based on their roles.
They do alsoprovide retention policy to be followed in such a way to get rid of documentswhich will have PPI data. This team manages all the security access to company’sbuilding and also any information related to security.Legal Team: Itis very important to have legal teammember as part of IR Planning committee who can suggest the real incident to bereported in case of any incident in the company. Legal team member should be technicalexpert who can analyze the incident in a right way and come up with aresolution so that cannot impact the business activities in a minimal way. Human Resources: Inmost of the scenarios users are the responsible for security issues but not inall the cases, users sometimes share their personal data to fraud telecommunications which could lead to security issues.
In such scenarios HR teamis responsible to handle such sensitive situation without making costumers panicand also without losing their business, this is little bit challengingsituation for HR team to manage smoothly. So, in order to get rid of suchsituations HR team member should be part of this IR planning committee.Public Relations: Thisteam plays their role when company’s incident response team has decided to announceabout the incident to public to makesure that public do not get shocked. It is needed for any company to considerthis situation as high priority to make sure that IR team members coordinatewith PR team so that message which is going into public conveys in a rightmanner.
This team should work hard enough to validate that IR team is sending communicationout about incident information to public accurately. Byconsidering importance of all the stakeholders as stated above IRP committee shouldhave one or more primary member from each team. A good planning upfront couldsave company from many unknown incidents in the future. As part of planning weshould also consider about how to overcome in case of any unpredictableincidents. This IRP states how to evaluate the root cause of Incident and thensteps to be followed in order to recover the incident.
Important steps to befollowed are identify the departments which are impacted by this Incident andalert the IR team to work with them, send out the right communication strategydepending on the type of Incident.Conclusion: AsI explained above 5 key stakeholders are important which can be part ofIncident Response Planning committee so that we can incorporate a strategywhich will minimize our efforts to recover the business activities in case ofany type of incidents. If these stakeholders are part of IR planning which willreduce the chance of being impacted by any kind of incidents.
To have a goodand progressive business running in a company we need a well-organized androbust Incident Response Planning.
